A Look at the Long List: 1. Arcade Fire – The Suburbs

Aka my attempt to go through the entire Polaris Music Prize Long List and walk you through, Kitchen-style, my thoughts as a member of the jury panel on each album as I tried to figure out what i was gonna vote for last week. There’s forty albums on the list so I might be biting off more than I can chew here but I’ll make my best effort to see this self-imposed exercise all the way through. Plus I just can’t stomach trying to keep up with all the aggregator style blog and their d-ck riding clones out there any more (not that i have in a long while anyway). Doing this provides me with an opportunity to try something a little different and off the usual, beaten path here at The Kitchen but that’s still tied into how I view music. As an added bonus, I won’t divulge which albums I voted for in the posts and I’ll go through them in alphabetical order so at the end, maybe we’ll run a little contest to see if people can figure it out based on what I say. We’ll try and do a ticket or some kind of other swag giveaway that I’ll try and organize maybe tied into the Polaris as a prize for whomever gets closest (details still to be figured out). So anyway, here goes….

Not much to say on this one. You know the group. Even you deep hip-hop heads who don’t pay attention to naan else probably ended up hearing about this group when they took the Album of the Year Grammy in a surprise win earlier this year. Now I ain’t gonna lie and say I’ve f-cked with these dudes from the get but I did start to pay attention to them once it was evident their star was in ascendancy last year. I will say that the album had grown on me after repeated listens by time I came back to it in consideration for the Polaris. While they’ve already been well-feted and celebrated this past year, there’s no doubt this is the album to beat as far as the Polaris goes. Here’s a couple tracks for those of you who’ve still managed to not hear anything from The Suburbs:

[audio: http://dl.soundowl.com/14j9.mp3]
MP3: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs [stream only, no download]

[audio: http://dl.soundowl.com/14j4.mp3]
MP3: Arcade Fire – Rococo [stream only, no download]

My Picks for the 2011 Polaris Music Prize Long List: An Explanation

The names of the nominees for the Polaris Music Prize long-list were announced last Thursday so this post is kind of moot at this point, but I thought it might be worth sharing my voting insights as a new member of the jury pool, such as they are, for those who wonder what the thought process is behind how these lists get determined. With that in mind here goes:

Here is your final Long List vote:
#1 = Art of Fresh – When The Night Comes In
#2 = Slakah the Beatchild – Something Forever
#3 = Emay – Mind Altering Dynamics
#4 = The Weeknd – House of Balloons
#5 = Eternia & Moss – At Last

Art of Fresh – When The Night Comes In

No joke, this was my favorite album of last year, period and, while I was up on Art Of Fresh before When The Night Comes In dropped, I discovered their most recent album in wholly nontraditional way (for hip-hop, at least): by seeing them perform much of it live in a short, ramshackle but incredible set at the album release event at the Czehoski bar in Toronto.

Now honestly, saying this was the best hip-hop album of 2010 is probably not the most hop-hop thing I could cop to admitting because, while producer and co-member Slakah and D.O.‘s credentials are without question, nonpareil (D.O. used to hold the Guinness World record for the longest freestyle and Slakah is signed as a solo artist to the highly-respected London record label, BBE), this album is not a pure hip-hop record by any measures that apply in 2011.

As a matter of fact, the analogy I would used to describe it’s amalgam sound of rare groove, house, electronic, pop and rock is that this is the album The Black Eyed Peas would make if they were UK soul boys reared in weekender culture and not crass, hit-seeking whores. All that being said, I play this album repeatedly and never tire of it and I can’t really say that for very many new albums nowadays.

I tried to rally people on the Polaris jury to support this record but ultimately I think it had a few too many beats aimed solely at the dance-floor for me convince the critic types on the Polaris to take it seriously. Albums with their phasers set on ‘Fun’ (not that the entire album actually is lightweight, throwaway fare in this case though) rarely get taken seriously as works of art (Michael Jackson‘s Off The Wall and Thriller being two very notable exceptions, maybe?) and that’s a damn shame. Shouldn’t having fun and celebrating the joy in life be an essential part of making art too??

Slakah the Beatchild – Something Forever

I knew I was probably shooting myself in the foot nominating two albums by essentially the same artist but Slakah the Beatchild has got to be one of my, if not the favorite producer of mine over the past 12 months. For those in the know, Toronto has long been known as a connoisseur’s market for rare groove and progressive urban music arguably second only to London and maybe Japan and Slakah’s super-soulful, organic production sound as heard on Something Forever, first released as an EP but later as Special Edition full-length release with four bonus tracks, are in many ways the embodiment of that aesthetic.

If you’ve ever nodded your head or tapped your toes to beats produced by Dilla, the Soulquarians (The Roots, Common, Erykah Badu etc.), the Ummah or Pete Rock, you owe it to yourself to check out this album. It features some rapped, some sung and some instrumental tracks but in no way sounds schizophrenic like some ‘producer-artist’ projects trying to straddle the hip-hop and R&B divide often do. This is a real album: cohesive-sounding and a true body of work. Even the vocal-less tracks will speak to you and fit with the whole. Something Forever is an absolute favorite of mine and while there seemed to be some other strong champions for it on the jury, I was gutted it didn’t make the long list of nominees in the end. Truly deserving of at least long list attention in my mind.

Listen to a sampler of Something Forever:

Now hit the jump to see my thoughts on my last three picks including Emay, Eternia and MoSS and the much-hyped, Drake-cosigned left-field R&B act, The Weeknd.

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